About PlainAirQuality

Our mission is to make European air-quality data accessible without paywalls, captchas, registration walls, or agency-specific interfaces. PlainAirQuality consolidates official observations from the European Environment Agency (EEA), Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), and national agencies into country, station, and pollutant pages that any citizen, journalist, or researcher can search, compare, and cite in seconds.

We focus on a single, narrow problem: what does the air actually look like where I live, in numbers I can interpret? Every page on this site answers some shape of that question by comparing observed concentrations to two regulatory benchmarks: the European Union Ambient Air Quality Directive (2008/50/EC, revised 2024) and the World Health Organization 2021 Global Air Quality Guidelines. Both benchmarks matter — EU limits define legal compliance, while WHO guidelines describe the concentration below which health risk is meaningfully reduced.

Our data

All data comes directly from the publishers below — no scraping, no estimation, no proxy modelling:

  • European Environment Agency (EEA) — Air Quality e-Reporting database under Directive 2008/50/EC. ~5,000 official monitoring stations across EEA-39 countries reporting hourly PM2.5, PM10, NO2, O3, SO2, CO, and benzene.
  • Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) — ECMWF-produced reanalysis combining satellite, aircraft, and ground observations into a continuous 0.1° gridded record. Used for trans-boundary attribution and exposure estimation.
  • Umweltbundesamt (UBA) Germany — National Air Quality Network with ~400 stations reporting in 30-minute increments.
  • ADEME / Atmo network (France) — National aggregation of 18 regional AASQA (Associations Agréées de Surveillance de la Qualité de l'Air) networks.
  • ISPRA (Italy) — National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, coordinating ~600 regional ARPA-network stations.
  • Defra / Ricardo Energy & Environment (UK) — Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) reporting under the 2010 Air Quality Standards Regulations.
  • WHO Air Quality and Health Programme — 2021 global guidelines used as the health-evidence benchmark on every page.

Methodology

We download EEA e-Reporting CSV/Parquet exports and per-country national feeds, normalize station identifiers to the EEA station code, and aggregate hourly observations to annual means, 24-hour maxima, and 8-hour ozone maxima per the standards defined in EN 12341 (gravimetric PM), EN 14211 (chemiluminescence NO2), and EN 14625 (UV photometry O3). Numbers are not modified, interpolated, or editorialized. Detailed processing notes, benchmark caveats, and known data limitations are documented on our methodology page.

Updates

The EEA publishes annual quality-assured (validated) datasets in September of the following year — for example, the 2024 validated dataset becomes available September 2025. National agency feeds publish provisional data in real-time or daily, but we use the EEA validated series as authoritative for annual means and exceedance counts. We refresh PlainAirQuality within two weeks of each new EEA release.

Not affiliated

PlainAirQuality is not affiliated with the European Environment Agency, the European Commission, Copernicus, the World Health Organization, or any national government agency. We are an independent data portal that re-presents public datasets in a more discoverable format. We do not accept payment from government agencies, industry trade groups, or environmental NGOs for the editorial content on this site.

Who built this

PlainAirQuality is published by ", an independent data-journalism publisher that compiles, verifies, and contextualizes public datasets. Kiznis Studio operates a fleet of single-niche data portals covering air, water, climate, environmental enforcement, public health, and consumer data — each focused on a specific public-data domain. Our editorial team is small, named below, and writes independently of any source agency.

Editorial process

Some editorial content on this site — guides, methodology summaries, and FAQ answers — is drafted and then reviewed by our editorial team for technical accuracy. Every piece of prose passes through the PlainAirQuality editorial review process before publication. Data pages themselves — country tables, station readings, pollutant limits — render the raw underlying EEA values via server-side SQL queries, unmodified.

Disclaimer

This site is for informational purposes only. Air-quality data comes from official European sources and is presented as published. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee completeness, and concentrations at any specific street, building, or moment may differ substantially from the station-level annual means we publish. Always consult local health authorities (national environmental agency, regional health board, or municipal advisories) for real-time exposure guidance, especially during pollution episodes, wildfires, or if you have a chronic respiratory or cardiovascular condition.

Contact

For questions, data corrections, or feedback, email hello@plainairquality.com or use our contact form. Corrections and removal requests are reviewed within two business days.